2024 Reading Wrapped

Dearest Readers,

With another year winding down, I want to start my annual wrap-up post by wishing you all peace, health, safety, and joy as we enter 2025. I would love to hear about your plans and goals for the new year, if you’d be willing to share in the comments. Here are some things I’ll have going on:

First, I plan to continue The Contemplative Reading Project. I share my reading updates there every 7-10 days & will be active only on that account moving forward (except for mid-year and year-end summary posts I’ll continue to share here.) Each month, we focus on just one book, which is announced in advance and by season. Most recently, we read You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, and our January group read is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

We also have some pretty exciting collaborations coming up over on the CRP blog, including a two-month group read of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way in February and March, as well as my contribution to The Classic Club’s yearlong Jane Austen celebration. I will be guest posting in September on my favorite Austen novel, Northanger Abbey! In June, we’ll be reading Ocean Vuong’s new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, which publishes in May.

General Goals

My reading goal for this year was set at 104 books, and as you’ll see from the StoryGraph chart below, I ended way ahead, having finished book 139 today (Stephen King’s The Langoliers). That said, this takes into account manga, which is super short and fast reading, and I’ve read 85 of those books so far this year–by far my biggest reading year for manga. If we eliminate manga from the equation, I’m only about 52% of the way to goal. (That sounds worse than it is, since my original goal was to read 50 books, and I only doubled it after seeing how much manga I was burning through. So, all things considered, let’s say I beat my goal by four books!) I also had one great streak in there, reading at least one page every day for 110 days in a row.

Moods

We can get a little deeper into the types of reading I’m doing if we look at the “mood,” as designated by me and other readers on StoryGraph. It looks like the majority of this year’s reads fell into the emotional, lighthearted, and adventurous categories, with reflective and funny rounding out the top five. I’m going to assume that most of those (certainly lighthearted, adventurous, and funny), are heavily influenced by my manga reading, with emotional and reflective coming from literary fiction, Buddhism, and poetry.

Pace and Length

I’m not at all surprised that 70% of my reading this year came in under 300 pages. What does surprise me, though, is that I’ve read some real chunksters of 500 or more pages. Six of them, in fact! These big ones included Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, Wellness by Nathan Hill, and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’m also a bit surprised that most of my books are considered “medium” pace, since I feel like manga generally moves quickly.

Genres and Favorites

Below is a helpful and easy little breakdown of the genres I’ve been reading. The awesome thing about StoryGraph, besides simply providing these constantly updated charts and graphs, is that they are interactive; so, I can click on a category in any of these reports and find the books that apply to it. This has been helpful in reviewing my ratings, for example, to remind myself of some truly stellar reads thus far this year. I’m also thrilled to see both poetry and lgbtqia+ genres in my top ten for the year.

I do think I’m going to focus in 2025 on being a bit more thoughtful about star ratings for books. I know I tend to pick well and to be pretty easily pleased, but an average rating of 4.29 for 130+ books just doesn’t sound right. (I guess the teacher in me could say, well, 4.29 out of 5.0 is only an 86%, so that’s not as great as it looks. But still, it seems high for an average.)

What were my favorites this year, you ask? Well, of all the books I’ve read so far this year, I’ve rated 11 of them 5 out of 5 (that’s only about 8.5% of my reads!) Five of those are manga, which I’m going to exclude except to say that I really enjoyed one particular manga series and rated multiple volumes of it with a perfect score. So, the remaining five star reads (6) plus an additional four 4.75-star reads are as follows:

1. Night Ocean by Carolyn Oliver
2. Answers in the Pages by David Levithan
3. The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh
4. Blackouts by Justin Torres
5. The Book of Joy by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu
6. Devotions by Mary Oliver
7. Dharma Talk: Poems by John Brehm
8. In the Absence of Men by Philippe Besson
9. In Memoriam by Alice Winn
10. Ziggy, Stardust & Me by James Brandon (re-read)

There’s a lot of poetry here, which seems appropriate since that’s the direction my reading and writing has been going, and also quite a bit of LGBTQIA+ fiction, which I’m always reading a lot of (that’s what my dissertation was on, after all!) and which I’m always eager to share.

Final Word and the New Year

So, according to StoryGraph, I read 134 books and 36,004 pages this year. I’m pleased that about 10% of my reads have been so stellar that I could give them a perfect score, and that quite a few others nearly earned that coveted 5 out of 5 as well. In reflecting on these ratings in particular, I can stand by all of them (except one, which I retroactively changed from a 5.0 to a 4.5.)

Overall, it was a really fantastic reading year, and I enjoyed my slow/reflective reading with The Contemplative Reading Project. I actually think balancing these month-long thoughtful reads with a lot of side reading “for fun” (manga) has been an effective way to go, but I still might try to slow it down even more in 2025 and also cut my manga by about half, so I can add more literature and poetry back into the mix.

If you’d like to keep up with my thoughts on books & more, please subscribe to my new project! I’ve been hosting it on WordPress since October 2023, but I am considering migrating to Substack. Do any of you have thoughts about the pros/cons of Substack versus WordPress?

Best wishes in the new year,

Adam